BRINGING TARZAN HOME
SEND HIM A POSTCARD FROM CAIRNS
FEW prisoners escorted into a police watch-house would be remembered as fondly as Michael Fomenko after he was locked up one night in 1954.
“He was different to everyone else,” recalled 87-year-old former Cairns policeman Keith Barnes, who was working the night Mr Fomenko, better known as Tarzan, was brought in for vagrancy. “He just wanted to live free. “He was harmless as far as I could see, but I think he was sent away for mental assessment and he was in an institution for a while.”
This week the Cairns Post reported Mr Fomenko’s sister Inessa wanted Far Northerners to send wellwishing postcards to her brother, who has lived at a Gympie nursing home since his legs gave out while walking to Sydney in 2012.
The tale of Tarzan has been one of the most enduring Far North stories of the past 12 months after the mystery of his whereabouts was solved. Many locals have been eager to tell of the fondness they had for the hermit-bushman.
Julatten resident Sheilaeh Rhodes remembers growing up on a block of land near the Daintree River jungle where Mr Fomenko made his home.
Ms Rhodes said, while Tarzan was a gentleman, her mother wasn’t always keen to have the scantily clad bushman hanging around her young daughters.
“She didn’t mind him half naked, but sometimes the laplap (loincloth) would blow up and, of course, he didn’t have knickers on. It was just a sugar bag,” Ms Rhodes said.
“Of course it didn’t worry him. He didn’t wear it when he went up home up the river.”
Ms Rhodes said Tarzan, then in his 20s, would travel 10km each day to get mussels from the mouth of the river and was very strong.
“My father watched him cross the Daintree River in full flood holding a sack of pumpkins in one hand,” she said.
“Then one day we heard he’d left ... apparently in a dugout canoe for New Guinea … and we never saw him again.”